At the end of 2019, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that there were 79.5 million people forcibly displaced around the world, including 26 million refugees, 4.2 million asylum seekers, and over 45 million internally displaced individuals.1 These figures underscore the timeliness of María Cristina García's The Refugee Challenge in Post–Cold War America, the first historical monograph that takes the narrative of US refugee policy beyond the 1980s and into the twenty-first century. García centers the interplay between forces that have prompted resettlement opportunities to expand and contract. Ultimately, she distills this debate to a contest between fears—about economic anxieties and terrorism, especially—and humanitarian impulses.The Refugee Challenge expertly charts these tensions in four chronological chapters. Chapter 1 explores the years immediately after 1989 using Soviet refuseniks, Chinese university students in the wake of the Tiananmen crisis, and Haitian and Cuban boat people as case studies. Chapter 2, also using a case study approach, explores the United States’ responses—or lack thereof—to genocide in Iraq, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo. García's third chapter provides a revealing look into changes in the US immigration bureaucracy. She vividly documents the importance of the 1993 and 2001 terrorist attacks by detailing how these events led to significant bureaucratic restructurings. The most notable such reorganization involved the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 and the inclusion of immigration policy under this new cabinet level center of power. Chapter 4 highlights the complex, even contradictory functioning of the asylum bureaucracy. Collectively, these chapters offer keen insight into the vitally important questions of how policy is made and implemented.The Refugee Challenge is a critical addition to our understanding of US refugee policy. Using a global framework and an interdisciplinary approach, García highlights key characteristics of US refugee policy in the post–Cold War era. First, she demonstrates the extent to which the United States, which so often acted unliterally during the Cold War, has come to selectively endorse a multi-lateral approach, working with the international community to address what are described as “refugee crises” in collective fashion. Second, García argues that the United States has embraced and, in fact, grown ever more dependent on the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other NGOs in its efforts to determine who is eligible for a coveted US refugee visa. García also notes that, third, the refugees and asylum-seekers admitted to the United States after 1989 hail from a much wider set of home nations than those who entered during the Cold War.Perhaps one of García's most important contributions is to demonstrate the inadequacy of the legal definition of “refugee.” Popular application of the refugee label has far eclipsed the legal requirements that one must be “outside” their country of nationality and facing political persecution to quality for refugee status. Those displaced by natural disasters, for instance, are routinely referred to as refugees. García's book demonstrates that it is not just pundits and popular audiences who apply the refugee label more liberally than the legal definition, it is policymakers as well. As García explains, the US government has often used “in country” processing for refugee resettlement, a practice that defies the requirement that one must be “outside” their country of nationality. García also traces the ways US officials admit refugees through creative means when “quotas have proved insufficient” (p. 3). Although both of these trends were present prior to 1989, especially in response to the Indochinese diaspora, García deftly shows how they became more pronounced in the post–Cold War era.This decoupling of the term refugee from its legal definition reveals the extent to which refugee admissions relies more on political will than legal structures. It is also indicative of larger trends. At the same time that the refugee label has become unmoored from its legal definition, technological advancements, especially drones, have promoted war to “burst out of its old boundaries” in ways that have prompted legal scholars to wonder if the ways we think about and regulate warfare are obsolete.2 The relationship between war and migration in these changing, complex circumstances will no doubt be of keen interest to historians in the years ahead.As relevant sources undergo declassification, it is inevitable that future works will expand, amend, and contest the conclusions offered in The Refugee Challenge. What is equally certain, however, is that the scholarly community owes García a huge debt of gratitude for blazing a trail upon which the next generation of scholarship can travel. Her latest book is essential reading.
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Sep 23, 2024
Jess Howsam Scholl + 1
Open Access